libMyPaint now uses autotools

May 20, 2016 • Andrew Chadwick

MyPaint’s brush engine, libmypaint, now needs to be built with autotools. This reduces its dependencies on things like Python, which is good for projects like GIMP which build against libmypaint. If you used to build MyPaint from git with special scons flags just to make libmypaint as a dependency for some other project, you don’t need to do that any more!

This is pretty much the final stage of making libmypaint a fully independent module. To reflect its new status, we will be making formal releases of libmypaint shortly for other projects to build with.

Build/install

$ ./autogen.sh # only needed when building from git
$ ./configure --prefix=/some/where
$ make distcheck

You can install it in the usual way too. However we will be making Debian-style packages available via the PPA shortly, including developer ones. There is already a git PKGBUILD for Windows MSYS2, and updates will be available shortly for Arch Linux.

Development of MyPaint will continue of course; in fact making this split happen has improved a lot of things in the codebases of both projects ☺ Big thanks to @Jehan for making this all work so well!